Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Gladiolus make wonderful cut flowers throughout the summer. Plant some every two weeks for continuous blooms.

• It’s time to put out oriole feeders. You can also attract them with fresh orange halves.

• Flower seeds can be sown directly in the garden now. Cosmos, marigolds and zinnias will give you beautiful flowers all summer.

• Plant the vegetable garden this month, but remember that late frosts can still nip tender young plants.

• Petunias can’t be beat for large, colorful blooms all summer long.

Sensational Wisteria

One of our most long-lived and reliable vines is the wisteria. Trained over an arbor or trellis with its long clusters of fragrant flowers almost covering the plant, it is truly a glorious sight.

Wisteria are hardy, vigorous, twining vines that have many landscape uses. They live for many years and can climb to great heights by means of twining stems. Older, established plants may have a twisted, woody trunk several inches in diameter.

Wisteria can be trained on a variety of supports. The important thing is that they are strong. As a wisteria grows, its trunk and branches become thick and heavy, sometimes outliving and replacing its support. They can be supported on trellises, hung from eaves (though they will try to creep into the house), espaliered on a fence or allowed to climb a tree. Make sure that the twining wisteria stems don’t girdle young trees.

Wisteria can also be trained to a standard, or tree shape, when young. They need to be pruned heavily in winter and have the long shoots removed throughout the summer to keep them from becoming vines.

There are two types of wisteria: Chinese and Japanese. The Chinese is the more common with 12-inch flower clusters that open all at once. The Japanese wisteria has very long clusters, 18-36 inches, and the flowers open in succession giving a longer, but less spectacular bloom. The most common flowers of both kinds are violet-blue, but white and pink forms are also available. Chinese wisteria will bloom in considerable shade while Japanese wisteria needs full sun.

Under normal conditions wisteria should bloom every spring. Sometimes a hard, late frost will kill the flower buds and lessen the bloom. Grafted plants should bloom within two years of planting. Plants which are grown from seed often do not bloom for 10 to 15 years or longer. A plant will also fail to bloom: if it does not receive enough sunlight; if it has been stimulated by excess nitrogen fertilizer; or if it has been pruned too heavily or improperly pruned.

If your wisteria is over 5 years old and hasn’t bloomed, try this: in late spring, dig a ditch around the vine 2 to 3 feet from its base and 18 inches deep. Mix 2 lbs. of superphosphate in with the soil and refill the trench. This combined root pruning and high-bloom fertilizer should help it bloom by next year. Do not allow suckers to sprout from the base of any wisteria, since the best varieties are grafted and suckers come from the rootstock.

Wisteria is grown primarily for the beauty of its showy, deliciously fragrant flowers. Its rapid growth rate makes it a good choice when fast coverage is desired.

Hang up Codling moth traps now to reduce the number of wormy apples in your harvest this year.

Enjoy the bright yellow colors of goldfinches outside your window by putting up thistle feeders for them.

Flowering dogwood trees are blooming now to help you choose a beautiful small tree for a focal point in your garden.

Turn in cover crops now and you will be ready to plant your summer garden in two or three weeks.

Check your rose bushes for frost damage and prune back burnt shoots into healthy green growth. Spray now with Neem Oil to prevent insect and disease problems.

The Cutting Garden
If you enjoy having fresh flowers in the house, it makes good sense to grow your own. With your own cutting garden, you can grow the flowers you love in the colors you want and make sure you have a selection of flowers for cutting most of the year.

Cut flowers are as easy to grow as vegetables when grown in blocks of the same kind. Choose plants that bloom for a long period and hold up well in the vase. Make sure you grow flowers that bloom at different seasons to have bouquets throughout the year.

In order to receive the maximum production of flowers, the garden should receive seven or eight hours of sun a day. The soil should be fertile with good drainage. There are also some flowers for cutting that can be grown in light shade, though flower production won’t be as great.

If you want to grow cut flowers in an ornamental garden, mix annuals and perennials with ornamental grasses, bulbs and roses. Grow at least three plants of each perennial and six of each annual to have enough flowers for cutting at one time.

Many of the best annual cut flowers are in the daisy family: asters, bachelor’s button, calendulas, cosmos, dahlias, marigolds, zinnias and sunflowers. Some contrasting flowers include gladiolus, dianthus, gayfeather, Victoria Blue salvia, snapdragons and stock.

Everlastings make great cut flowers for fresh or dried arrangements. Baby’s breath, globe amaranth, pink candle celosia, yarrow, statice and strawflowers are easy to air-dry without losing their color or form. Some, such as purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans produce bold, bristly seedheads that are nice in dried arrangements.

Perennials from the daisy family include: aster, gaillardia, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans, Shasta daisy and painted daisy. Cup-and-saucer campanula, delphinium, lupine and penstemon offer tall spikes of bold flowers. Iris, poppies, peonies, daffodils, lilies, tulips and roses have individual flowers to uses as centerpieces of your arrangements.

Ornamental grasses add drama to flower arrangements. Use Northern Sea Oats, fountain grass, feather reed grass (Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’), or Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis) in both modern and country-style arrangements.

For long-lasting cut flowers, be sure to include carnations, Peruvian lilies (alstromerias), delphiniums, roses, lilies and sunflowers in your cutting garden. Their blooms will last in the vase for 6-14 days.

In areas that receive less than two hours of sun a day, you can grow astilbe, columbine, foxglove, and old-fashioned bleeding heart. If your flower bed is under deciduous trees, daffodils and tulips will flower nicely before the trees leaf out in the spring.

Whether you create a cutting garden, or add cut flowers to your ornamental flower beds, it’s easy to have lots of pretty cut flowers to enjoy indoors all season long.

• Tomatoes can be set out with protection. “Wall-O-Water” will protect them down to 20°F and will give them a warm environment during the day.

• Plant sunflowers now from seed or plants. Choose either the multi-stemmed kinds for cut flowers or the giants for edible seeds.

• Dahlias come in a wide variety of colors and shapes. Plant the roots now for flowers this summer.

• New rose bushes may have been damaged by the cold weather last week. Prune back dead shoots and new growth will come out to replace it soon.

• Bleeding hearts are charming perennials for the shade garden. Look for them now for a special accent.

Camellias: A Gift from Asia

A gift from the Orient to temperate gardens of the world, camellias have long held a position of esteem in their native lands. In China, Japan and Korea the camellia motif is a familiar decoration on everything from architecture to textiles.

It is known that one species, Camellia sinensis, has been grown for at least 3,000 years — not for its flowers but for its leaves, which are used to make tea. The first camellia arrived in Europe in the 1500s, but not until the 19th century were they imported for public use. Soon after, European nurseries started raising new varieties from seed, offering hundreds of named varieties by the end of the century. There are now over 3,000 named varieties.

Camellias grow naturally in forest settings, where the forest floor is a thick, soft carpet of decaying leaves and twigs and the soil is loose and crumbly. Since California is much drier than eastern Asia, we need to modify our natural conditions to grow camellias well.

Fortunately, camellias are quite adaptable. Given a rich, humusy soil to live in, their care consists mainly of watering and fertilizing. They need protection from hot sun and strong winds, and do best with morning sun and afternoon shade. The roots should stay moist, but not soggy, at all times. A natural mulch kept around the plants will keep moisture in and improve the soil. Use bark, wood chips or oak leaves.

The first year, plants need only be watered and mulched. After that, you can fertilize with a commercial fertilizer formulated for camellias, or with cottonseed meal. Be sure the soil is moist when you apply any fertilizer. When in doubt use less, as camellias can be damaged or killed by too much fertilizer.

Unlike other flowering shrubs, camellias need no annual pruning to stay healthy and attractive. You can maintain their shape by taking two or three leaves with the bloom when cutting flowers. If a plant is not as bushy as you would like it to be, cut out last year’s growth in late spring and several branches will start below the cut.

Clean-up is important for healthy camellias. Remove faded flowers before they fall, especially any that have brown petals, an indication of petal blight.

Treat your camellias well and they will give you beautiful blooms each spring, and grow to be beautiful, large landscape plants.